Thinking Outside the Soapbox
Microsoft's video sharing community site, Soapbox on MSN Video, launched today as a private beta. We're still trying to gain access to the site so that we can bring you a full review. In the meantime, here's what we know about it based on limited information from Microsoft and a blog post by MS employee Kurt Shintaku.
Soapbox is Microsoft's answer to YouTube. From what we can gather, Soapbox will allow users to share videos, rate them, comment on them, publish them with RSS feeds and embed the videos on their blogs inside a player widget.
If Microsoft is really going to run in the same race with YouTube, this last bit will make all the difference. Microsoft has two active social communities under their Live banner, Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Messenger. Soapbox will live or die depending on how easy it is for users of those services to post and share Soapbox videos on their Live personal pages. What kind of functionality can non-Microsoft bloggers (like MySpace users) expect from the embedded player?
Also, we should watch for news about integration with Microsoft's hardware end: Media Center PC, the XBox game console and the Zune handheld device.
In an interesting technical note, the service will be platform agnostic. Users can upload videos they've created in any format, and Soapbox's servers will convert the videos into Windows Media and Flash versions. Windows users visiting the site will be served Windows Media videos, and Mac users (and, we presume, Linux users) will receive a Flash-wrapped experience. How remarkably not short-sighted!
The video sharing space is already getting crowded. AOL recently joined YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and MySpace Video in the user-generated video space with UnCut Video. We're waiting to see what Microsoft will bring to the party.
